Page 87 of Feral Keep

The Unmade gets up.

Caved chest. Broken wrist. The pale body rises on its massive thighs and the shriek comes again—the same shriek, the same volume, the lungs working through a ribcage that’s been caved in because the body doesn’t know it should be dead. I scream—”BEHIND YOU!”—and Red spins. Catches it by the throat with both hands. It thrashes—thighs kicking, appendages striking his arms, his face. A claw opens a gash across his cheek. Blood sheets down the crimson skin.

He slams it into the ground. Once. Twice. Three times. The neck breaks. The thrashing stops. He holds it for five seconds. Ten, making sure, because the caved chest wasn’t enough the first time. The thing doesn’t move. Whatever kept it going after its chest collapsed, the broken neck was enough to finish it.

He drops it. Tears the fence apart, three gaps, wide enough for women to walk through. The cattle wire shrieks and gives way in his hands, metal surrendering to something that was always stronger.

In the chaos of the fence coming down, the women scatter. Some toward the gaps—instinct, the body seeing a way out and moving before the mind can argue. Some toward the barracks—the conditioned response, the known walls. Some drop to the ground in camp-freeze, their hands over their heads, the posture of women who have learned that when violence happens, you make yourself small and you wait.

“It’s okay!” I’m through the gap, running, or moving as fast as I can with the belly and the fuel on my hands and the adrenaline. “He’s mine! He’s with me! He won’t hurt you!”

But Shayla is faster than me.

She’s already at the barracks. Her voice cutting through the screaming, the administrator’s voice, the one that ran morning assembly, the one these women have obeyed for years because obeying kept them alive. “Inside! Get inside! The Shade will kill you—inside, NOW!”

Women who were moving toward the gaps stop. Turn. The conditioning is so deep it overrides what their eyes are telling them, the pregnant woman in front of them, alive, fed, calling their names. Shayla’s voice is older, louder, more practiced. The lie they know vs. the truth they don’t.

Half of them go back.

The barracks door closes, Shayla’s voice behind it, muffled, working the fear, the bolt sliding home—from the inside.

Gretchen is on the ground where the fence dropped her. I kneel beside her, take her burned hands. The palms are blistered, white welts raised against her dark skin, the pattern of wire pressed into the flesh. She’s conscious. Her eyes are open, the tears running down her face, but she’s not making a sound. Camp-trained. You hold the pain in your teeth.

“I’m here, Gretchen, I’m here.”

Lisa is already up. She materialized from the scattering, sharp-faced, fast, the woman who works it instead of freezing. She’s pulling women toward the gaps. “Move. Now. While the fences are down. Move.” Her voice carries the same authority as Shayla’s—the same camp-born command—but pointed in the opposite direction.

But not enough. Not fast enough.

A sound comes from beside the barracks, a choked cry. A woman is on the ground—one of the fleeing Eunuchs ran through the compound in the chaos, the elongated arm still swinging, the sharpened bone weapon catching the light. The woman is young. Dark hair matted to her forehead with sweat. Her hands press her side where the bone shard went in, and the blood is already spreading through her fingers.

Lisa is beside her in seconds. Her hands on the wound, blood between her fingers. “Maeve. It’s deep.”

I crawl to them, knees in the blood, the packed earth turning dark under us. The woman’s eyes find mine. Confused. Frightened. The look of someone who woke up this morning expecting another day of clearing and is now lying in the dirt with a bone shard in her side and two women she doesn’t know pressing hands against the hole.

“What’s her name?”

“Ruth.”

“Ruth, I’m Maeve. Stay with me.”

She doesn’t stay. Less than a minute. The light goes out the way the generator died—a sputter, a dimming, stillness. Her hand goes slack in mine, the fingers uncurling, the warmth leaving them in real time, the blood still seeping from the wound because the heart kept pumping for a few seconds after the rest of her stopped.

I hold her hand.

Something in me goes very quiet and very loud at the same time, the way it used to when a bunkmate didn’t wake up and the whole barracks pretended not to notice so the Eunuchs wouldn’t dock the morning count. I don’t know this girl. I knew her for four minutes. My chest is doing something enormous anyway, a pressure behind my sternum with nowhere to go, because there isn’t time.

Shayla’s voice from behind the barracks door: “THIS is what she brought you! A dead woman! Inside—now!”

More women go in, through the gaps Shayla left, the other barracks doors, opening and closing. The fear pulls them back to the known thing, the walls, the voice that tells them what to do because having someone tell you what to do is easier than standing in a compound with a dead woman and a nine-foot monster and choosing.

Red is at the perimeter, bleeding from his face, his side, his gold eyes scanning the compound, counting—the women in the gaps, the women behind the barracks door, what we saved weighed against what we lost.

“Maeve.” Lisa’s voice. Flat. Urgent. “We have who we have. She’s locked the rest inside. We need to go before the Eunuchs come back with reinforcements.”

She’s right. The Eunuchs fled toward the nearest Ordained outpost, toward whatever backup the system provides. We have minutes. Maybe an hour.

“How many?” I ask.